Social Media & Fitness – How We Helped a Health & Fitness Facebook Page Reach over 200,000 People

Can social media help people achieve their health and fitness goals?

This is a question we already explored with our social media for gyms campaign. But it’s one thing to use Twitter to encourage people to join a gym. This time, the challenge was to use Facebook to encourage people to attend exercise classes.

24 Fit is a Derby-based fitness group that puts on about 30 exercise classes a week.

In early 2017 they planned to launch a number of new classes in a number of new venues. They approached us in late 2016 with a relatively simple brief – to use Facebook to generate awareness of these new classes.

A good metric by which to measure the influence of a Facebook page is through the number of people who saw the page content (known as “reach”).

When we took over the management of 24 Fit Derby’s Facebook page, it had a weekly reach of around 200.

In just six weeks, we’d boosted this weekly reach to over 200,000. We also generated over 200 link clicks and increased the page likes by over 100:

Our Strategy – Get People Excited

Our first step was to check 24 Fit Derby’s Facebook Insights to see when their fans were most active. We found there to be spikes of activity at 9:00am, 5:00pm, 7:00pm, and 9:00pm, so we decided to post four times a day during these periods of peak activity.

Next, we created Facebook events for all of the upcoming classes that 24 Fit wished to fill. There were three benefits to doing this:

1) It created a comprehensive timetable of classes on the group’s increasingly-popular Facebook page.

2) It gave anyone interested in attending all the information they needed, along with a place where they could ask any additional questions.

3) It ensured that anyone who registered their interest in each event would receive regular notifications in advance, increasing the likelihood they’d attend.

With our ideal posting times in place, and with our calendar of events sorted, the next step was to do all we could to get people engaged and excited on Facebook.

What Sort of Posts Work Best on Facebook?

24 Fit shared a huge amount of photos and videos with us, so we had plenty of content to work with. We also attended and filmed a few classes ourselves, one of which we streamed live.

It soon became clear that when it comes to boosting reach and engagement on Facebook, nothing is more effective than video.

We posted at least one video a day, with captions that were carefully crafted to encourage engagement. We used an energetic and effusive tone.

Whenever anyone commented on our posts, we answered them as quickly as possible. Even when they weren’t asking a direct question, we’d still make a point of acknowledging their input.

This sent a message to Facebook that this was an active and popular page, and it’s possible that the algorithm reacted accordingly: The more people engaged, and the more we interacted, the more people our posts reached.

If a post was performing particularly well, we’d boost it. By paying a small amount, we grew the reach by thousands.

The Results – A Phenomenally Popular Facebook Page

Things took off quickly. The following screenshots demonstrate how 24 Fit Derby’s Facebook page grew on a daily basis in just one week in early January. Pay particular attention to the reach, which by the end of the week had grown by 2,877%:

3rd Jan, 2017

4th Jan, 2017

5 Jan, 2017

6 Jan, 2017

9 Jan, 2017

And as the post stats demonstrate, most of this reach was organic. Boosting posts certainly helped, but the reach would have been impressive enough regardless:

By the end of the campaign the page’s reach, which had peaked at 202,633, had dipped. But given that the reach stood at around 250 when we took over the account, this still represented a major boost:

So can social media help people to achieve their health and fitness goals?

This case study demonstrates that Facebook can prove extremely effective at generating awareness and kindling excitement for exercise classes.